A few weeks ago, I finally made the leap to attempt painting for the first time. I’ve long admired the “painterly” look across the different mediums, particularly the textures and qualities produced by oil paints. It’s been a long term goals to learn, but had always seemed like something I’d try some far-off, unspecified day. So, I surprised myself greatly
Read more
At the moment, I am quite backlogged in terms of both finished portraits I haven’t yet written about and ideas for future drawings. I’ve written about my tendency to get behind on this sort of thing, to develop a backlog, but this feels like the most extreme it’s been in a long while. I currently have four finished drawings that
Read more
Way back in April (which feels like it was years ago now somehow), there was a healthcare worker “portraits for heroes” thing going around on social media. The gist of it was, as a small way to show appreciation for people on the front lines as COVID-19 raged, artists were doing free portraits. Although I don’t have a large social
Read more
Since getting back into drawing in 2017, I’ve generally been under the impression that most of my artwork has been of my family. I also had a feeling that the most frequent subject was probably my wife. Because data is fun, I decided there was no point in just assuming or guessing – better to crunch the numbers and find
Read more
Wow, has it really been another entire month since I’ve drawn anything? Sort of a surprising realization, because it feels like I was just writing about how I hadn’t drawn much lately. But that wasn’t last week…it was last month! Once that thought hit me that October was headed towards its Halloween conclusion, it was enough to push me into
Read more
It seems like I haven’t posted much lately, which is confirmed when I look at the monthly archive counts on my sidebar. Over the last year, I think I’ve averaged 9-10 posts per month, with some peaks and valleys. But June and July have been huge valleys, with only six and then three posts! This does make sense though; summer
Read more
This weekend, I made my first clumsy attempt at digital art. And over the last couple months, I’ve been almost exclusively drawing fictional characters from movies, athletes, and performers. That’s been a significant change from earlier in the artwork timeline on this site, when I pretty much always sketched my family. I mentioned months ago I needed to diversify my subjects,
Read more
Welcome to part two of this reckless “drawing two things at once” series. Basically, I was so pumped up from feeling like I’ve actually been improving, I decided to sketch two scenes concurrently. This was not my best idea, as I felt compelled to finish too much too quickly. The smaller sketch suffered in quality partially because of that. The
Read more
I’m in an unusual place with this sketching hobby right now. I can see improvement in the results to some degree, and it’s making me excited to draw more. But, I’m still not that imaginative in terms of subject matter, and I am sort of running out of ideas. A natural place my brainstorming goes is, “which people/family member combinations
Read more
As I scroll through Amdall Gallery’s main page, I can’t help but notice how my drawings have changed. Not everyone may agree, but I believe there has been an improvement over time. From August 2017 until now, after about seven months of practice, these sketches seem more confident to me. Especially when it comes to color; skin tones seem more
Read more
This is sort of a part two from my post Friday night about drawing my wife, and the challenges of art involving people you are close to. Basically, the goal I’m striving for is to get some more accurate sketches of my wife, since several I’ve done in the past didn’t quite look like her. The first attempt I
Read more
I have drawn four total sketches of my wife. From what I can see looking at these previous drawings, I don’t think I’ve ever quite captured her accurately. Years ago, I did one of me and her together, and it wasn’t bad. I also did a rough sketch I used for my proposal, which looked like her but was no
Read more
A couple months ago, we took the family to North Park Mall in Dallas. While we wandered around, we came across a live song-and-dance thing for kids. It was a guy named “David Chicken,” who played guitar, sang, and did fun interactive stuff with the kids in the audience. My oldest daughter absolutely loved it, she danced and cheered pretty
Read more
Last night, after putting the kids to bed, I was smacked with an urge to try to draw my entire family. I’ve drawn my wife and I together, and I’ve drawn our girls a couple of times, but I haven’t done a sketch with all four of us as a group. Usually for something like this, I’d draw a grid
Read more